Why We Need "Enlightened"

Michelle Dean: We have
gathered here today because, and I think this is not an exaggerated
term, we are devoted to “Enlightened,” the struggling HBO show from
Mike White that stars Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a woman who… is
struggling to figure out life. That sounds kind of patronizing, but
it’s the only way to put it.

Recently I found myself actively worrying about the show’s
potential cancellation as I went about my day. And I keep tossing
around different reasons of articulating why. One is of course that
like
David Haglund at Slate, I think it’s the most interesting show
on television right now, as well as the best acted and written and
the most aesthetically rich. That sounds so boringly ordinary media
narrative-y, but it does feel like the only show where I see a line
back to the best of the “prestige cable” shows of the last few
years, shows like “The Sopranos” and the better seasons of “Six
Feet Under” and “Deadwood.” White’s grasp of people’s interior
lives is so much richer than anything else on television. Which of
course, lately, I understand to be “unpopular,” because things like
the sight gag-driven “Girls” or the pageantry of “Mad Men” are what
“we” want.

Jane Hu: I’m generally quite quick to invest in the
television I watch, but I’m actually protective of
“Enlightened,” getting into frenzied arguments and pleading rants
about why it’s so singular and why everyone should watch it. You,
reader, why aren’t you watching it right now??

Michelle, I too have been overcome with an increasing concern
that the show won’t get the third season it so obviously deserves.
That White seemed to be gratefully grasping at any praise the show
could get in his
HuffPo interview broke my heart: “He deserves better than
this!” Suddenly, all other television felt like the enemy. That
interview came out a bit over week ago, and since then there’s
definitely been a swell in critical attention. Where have all these
other viewers been? (Admittedly, I had also been quiet on
“Enlightened” until a month ago, when I started rewatching episodes
in anticipation for the Todd Haynes-directed one. Please HBO, don’t
make me have only these two seasons to rewatch.)

Maura Johnston: I started watching “Enlightened” at the
jump, and I remember feeling like it was somewhat falsely
advertised in the first season; the
posters showed Dern mid-first-episode-meltdown, teasing a show
with an unhinged female at the center! and the promise of lunacy!
and maybe at least one meltdown a show! Of course, things did not
work out that way—the impressionistic first season felt at times
like an uncomfortable, if very precisely remembered, dream, with
long silences and rich hues draping the suburban Southern
California setting; some of the social situations were the stuff of
nightmares, the bad dreams that you have where you’re rooted in a
place and can’t leave because your legs just won’t move,
thanks to all those deeply buried memories and thoughts in your
brain that are locking you in place. Laura Dern’s show-bracketing voiceovers had
this drowsiness to them, but it was the type of sleepiness that
accompanies an awakening, not a drifting into sleep. (The second
season is a bit more “plotted,” as it were, and the stark onyx of
Abaddonn’s fortress—that’s the company where Dern works—seems to
pay visual tribute to the show’s increased dramatic structure.)

But even though it’s beautifully written, elegantly shot and
well-acted (and has made me curl up into a ball at least twice an
episode this season), I don’t think it’s too surprising that this
show is on the brink—and not just because I have a taste for lip
glosses that get discontinued and foodstuffs that I can only find
in, like, one grocery store, and maybe only for a few months. I’ve
heard people complain that they don’t find Amy “relatable,” and I
have to think that’s in large part because she’s a female character
who isn’t interested in presenting herself as someone who people
have to like. That shit is only reserved for your Don Drapers, your
Walter Whites—hell, your Jerry Seinfelds and your George Costanzas,
even. In that way “Enlightened” reminds me a bit of “Bunheads,”
another show with a Woman Of A Certain Age Who Has Her Own Things
Going On at its core; it, too, has low ratings and a question mark
hanging over its future. Mike White’s dialogue is certainly slower
than Amy Sherman-Palladino’s rapidfire patter, and Amy Jellicoe is
more of an out-and-out antihero than Michelle Simms, acting more
blatantly in her (sublimated) self-interest and seeming more
deliberately divorced from the real world. But both characters are
at an age where they should have kids and don’t, where they should
have signposts of stabile adulthood and don’t (both are living
rent-free, Amy with her mother and Michelle with her
mother-in-law), where they should be settled. Neither of
them is, though, and watching that struggle is essential to both
shows’ driving force.

(Dear HBO: If you do renew “Enlightened,” please don’t take this
comparison as an excuse to “suggest” to Mike White that he add a
group of dancing teenagers to the ensemble.)

Michelle: I don’t find it hard to understand “why,”
exactly, in the sense that I think that things that actually push
people, challenge their comfortable assumptions—say, in Amy’s case,
that people with her awkward social skills and occasionally
arbitrary convictions have no internal lives worth learning
about—are not going to be popular, either in terms of high ratings
or the kind of ersatz popularity of (oh, I keep coming back to it)
“Girls,” where it’s mostly a “conversation” piece, except all the
conversations are stupid.

That said I think if and when HBO cancels, it will be their
death knell—with me at least, and maybe for others, too—as a
purveyor of “television with a difference” or whatever the PR
logline was. God, they must be making so much money from
subscriptions owing to “Game of Thrones”—and I have the feeling
will have a lot more soon as we increasingly move away from cable
as the delivery mechanism—that they can support something this tiny
as proof of their aesthetic convictions. But they’re not going
to.

Maura: Does HBO still even use “It’s Not TV… It’s HBO” as
a slogan? You’d think that the channel keeping “Enlightened” on
despite its low numbers would be proof positive of that ideal.

Jane: It’s true! I thought keeping “Enlightened” around
would be an act of good HBO faith. And for other, though related,
reasons, I’ve been wondering this season how much “Girls” has hurt
or helped “Enlightened”: the proximity of airing time and the focus
on female protagonists felt like it would help, but the
media magnet quality of “Girls” that swallows all sources of
attention most certainly doesn’t. Well, White answered my
question today, in his wonderful
Vulture interview:

It’s sort of true about Girls, because it has so much
buzz and not great numbers. We have less buzz and less numbers. It
actually hurts us. In a way, Girls is the show that they go,
“Well, even if the ratings aren’t great …” If Girls was
doing huge numbers and we were still doing bad numbers, then we
could be more the pro bono case. But Girls is like the pro
bono case.

After reading that I felt a little silly; also contrite, because
I co-write a blog on “Girls”—with three other people! (Not to turn
this into an anti-“Girls” screed, I obviously enjoy “Girls,” as
does White.) I think the knowledge that something like
“Enlightened” simply existed did something to my naïveté levels,
prompting me to believe that maybe the media landscape wasn’t so
bad because, hey, Amy Jellicoe’s neuroses and conflicts were
getting airtime (inflected through White’s dazzling script no less)
and there was even an audience for it! I admit these past few weeks
have been an exercise in disillusionment, as though I were
replicating a version of Amy’s own narrative—letting go, coming to
terms with the blasé attitudes of those around me, feeling a wee
bit righteous…

What still disappoints me, though, is how the audience for the
underdog “Girls” hasn’t engaged much with the
underdog-to-the-underdog “Enlightened.” I mean, HBO put White’s
show immediately after Dunham’s—viewers didn’t even have to
try. Now there’s a substantial difference between “Girls”
and “Enlightened,” I’m aware, but Michelle has made some
compelling comparisons between “Homeland” and “Enlightened” as
well.

Michelle: Well, to an extent my own references to “Girls”
above were calculated to do the same. I find the shows similar only
in the most superficial ways. “Homeland” is less so now that the
show went in the sort of complete fantasy-world direction.

Jane: Since its first season, “Homeland” has broken so
many narrative rules! But what about “Enlightened,” which seems to
be its own odd sort of storytelling genre? At times it feels so
novelistic (the first-season episode “Consider Helen” was like a
short story) so there’s definitely a kind of realism to it, and, as
Michelle noted, character interiority is well explored. Then this
season White emphasized the cyber-thriller aspect of it—meant to
speed up plot—which brought out all these juicy moments
illustrating how technology can play out on television. The
characters to me are much more consistent than those of most
television (that White writes all the scripts likely contributes to
this), but what isn’t consistent is narrative perspective: from
whose viewpoint are we seeing from, and how, keeps changing.

Maura: “Enlightened” as an episodic series is like a book
of linked short stories to me.

Jane: Yes! I describe it as Dubliners but for Los
Angeles and its suburbs.

Maura: This might be why it’s so difficult to describe
what the show is “about” to people who want a thumbnail sketch of
what they’re getting into, and why word of mouth was so slow to
spread until the current SAVE THIS SHOW FOR THE LOVE OF GOD frenzy.
The through-line is obviously Amy and her reconciling the lessons
she learned in Hawaii with her actual day-to-day existence and the
people who populate it, but there are so many other things to pick
out from it—office-drone life, being a cog in a corporatist wheel,
mother-daughter relationships, addiction, marriage. The whole plot
of “A Ghost Is Seen,” with Mike White’s character Tyler finding a
companion living alone for so long—and the fear that one
experiences when one does find a connection with another human
being later in life—could be the focus of its own series,
really.

Michelle: I honestly think the reason people are made
uncomfortable is connected to the religious aspects of the show.
Insofar as it’s, you know, sort of about how to live a good life,
and it’s spoken of sometimes as a “New Age satire.” I don’t know
that I think Mike White means it as satire, exactly, all of Amy’s
voiceover invocations. You’re meant to understand that even though
these things all sound clichéd, they are comforting, and you’re
meant to respect that Amy draws succor from them even as she’s
clearly deluding herself.

Maura: But comfort does come from cliché at times, no?
The topic of cliché being helpful to the idea of overcoming
addictions has
come up on this site before, obviously, and given that Amy
sends Levi to Open Air so he can kick his various habits, the
connection here is pretty transparent. In the hands of a less
delicate writer (and less skilled actors), the “satire” would be a
lot more obvious and the show would be a lot more of a clunker. Why
the show works so often for me and punches me in the gut is that it
engages in a high-wire act—here is a person who could very easily
be a punching bag, or the butt of a lot of jokes, and even though
if you met her in person she would very likely be annoying and she
is downright inconsiderate to people a lot of the time, I
feel a genuine sympathy for her, and that comes from how utterly
human she is. That’s true for a lot of the characters who fill out
the ensemble as well—the painful awkwardness of Tyler, the
simmering rage of Dougie, the crystalline sadness inside Helen.
(Janice, the poisonous, climbing co-worker played by Michaela
Watkins, is one of the few who doesn’t.)

But I see a lot of myself in Amy, that’s for sure, and I don’t
necessarily mean that in a good way.

Jane: As much as I believe that those who enjoy the show
understand and even relish in how White manages that balance of
satire and sympathy, it really is true that most of us come at it
from some place of love, or empathy. I see myself in Amy, I
adore Tyler because he’s my favorite kind of anxiously quiet
outsider, and Dougie is utterly and painfully failing at all
attempts to be a clichéd bro that I just want to hold him, or at
least share a joint with? It might be a kind of bad empathy or
overidentification, but I think that’s part of its magic, as well
as why I am losing legitimate sleep over the thought of its
cancellation.

“Enlightened” is frequently hilarious—often at the sake of
Amy—but it rarely comes off as straight satire, if ever. There’s
that thing again, I think, about genre, where the audience expects
this HBO show to confirm all their presumptions about the soppy
conventions of the self-help movement, but instead they’re faced
with a perspective that won’t allow them to do so, at least not
easily. The voiceovers place the viewer so firmly (and so
melodramatically—Dern’s delivery!) in Amy’s head, and I think if
one’s first impulse is to reject her New Age beliefs, that’s
difficult. But what’s also difficult, it seems, is just the simple
fact of Amy’s vulnerability.

Michelle: The interplay between her vulnerability and the
New Age stuff was really tough going this season. Watching her with
Dermot Mulroney’s character, whose name by the way I keep thinking
of as actually “Dermot Mulroney” because he is himself the only
type, the only cipher I think the show has given us, has been
killing. me. You keep hearing Amy say that her relationship with
him was cementing this perfect new life, but it was clear that the
relationship was doomed. And it was clear from small things, the
way his affirmations of attraction to her were all half-distracted,
non-committal.

Jane: See, that was so difficult to watch! Maybe
even more so for us because we’re invested in Amy, and part of the
pain in watching comes from a realization that Amy doesn’t see as
much as we see. There are all these signs leading up to the episode
directed by Todd Haynes where they have sex for the first time—what
seemed most peculiar about that particular scene (we all knew it
was coming) was that it comes so early in the episode. Like all of
Amy’s moments of pristine hope, even if somewhat self-deluded
(because how else?), that sex scene sort of sticks out as this odd
moment of joy. Last episode, when she sputtered, “I didn’t know all
along,” while leaving Jeff’s apartment was possibly even more
heartbreaking for the fact that we did.

Maura: I wonder if part of that naïvété, though, is
because she doesn’t have lots of experience with other men? In the
episode before last, Levi—Amy’s not-quite-ex-husband, played with
perfectly tinged pathos by Luke Wilson—freshly returned from rehab
and ready to start over with Amy, told her that they’d wanted a
life together for 25 years. She’s in her mid-40s at most, which
means that they were probably together from the time they were in
college, if not high school. She obviously had the affair that
kicked off the breakdown at the series’ outset, but her lack of
experience in relationships would definitely cause her to see sex
as something capital-m Meaningful, particularly with someone who
epitomizes the difference-making life that she wants to live. (This
may have happened to me with guys in the past. Yes,
pluralized.)

Jane: Oof, when Amy tells Jeff she misses him or wants to
hang out, and he hems before agreeing to—there’s that split-second
in between where Amy senses that he might not be that interested in
her—and you realize that of course she’s not deaf to social cues.
She’s just a little too bright-sided at times for this world, but
THAT’S WHY WE NEED “ENLIGHTENED.” It’s the only show that
understands our optimistic impulses, even if they get us in the
end.

Amy is someone who wants to believe—who invests so wholly, and
attaches so grandly, to the stories she tells herself about,
y’know, the Good She’s Going To Do, and the Future Changes She Can
Make. She comes back in the pilot as someone who wants to remake
herself, as well as remake those around her—but the real interest
of the show has been seeing how she’s overextended in her desires
and dreams, as well as unable to let anything go.

Michelle: I don’t know that I think she is overextended!
Like the funny thing is I think her dreams are relatively concrete;
half the pathos of the show is about how the world won’t give her
the simpler things, and instead of shrinking she just ramps up her
expectations. If Abaddonn had just given her the job she wanted,
when she came back from her Hawaiian… rehab, I don’t know that her
inner radical would have come out.

Jane:Yes, there’s very much a sort of “Curb Your
Enthusiasm” thing going on, where Amy might seem impossible at
times, but everyone around is her is just as bad, if not worse. I
also mean ‘overextended’ in the sense that she’s both attached to
the past (her prior life with Levi and all the dreams therein) as
well as trying to find ways of moving forward. Doesn’t the project
of “Enlightened” seem to be: how do we move forward if it’s so
difficult to let go?

Michelle: Yeah. I mean the funny thing about Mike White’s
worldview, given that he was raised evangelical (to an extent, it’s
all complicated) is that it is so, so Buddhist. I mean he has said
in interviews that he’s a great follower of Pema Chodron’s
writings, as I have become too. The thing is, her advice would
effectively tell Amy that she has to stop trying to get all this
ground beneath her feet. Like she has to stop hoping she will have
the perfect career, the perfect relationship, etc., because those
things don’t exist and because they don’t matter. Chodron’s
teachings are all about learning to live with groundlessness, with
not having certainty in your life. With recognizing that what you
think of as “certain”—your righteousness, your love with someone
else—is actually transient and that holding to it is what’s causing
you pain.

Jane: Right! I’ve actually been finding myself trying to
trace evangelical impulses that might be underwriting the show just
because it is still so clearly a part of how White reads the
narrative of his life as a whole. Sometimes, Amy’s neuroses—her
anxieties and guilt and struggles of co-dependency—seem to ring of
a kind of faith so antithetical to Buddhism. It’s one that wants to
do away with doubt, and put stock in retribution. So that’s been a
really interesting conflict as Amy strives to follow the dictums in
her self-help books.

Michelle: Which is why I think White chose, in the most
recent episode, to have the Abaddonn CEO give Amy an answer she
totally wasn’t expecting. Because it shook her whole “mission” up,
fast.

Though all of that makes me wonder what, if White is given
another season, he’ll do to the sweet, solid romantic affair his
own character has. Things fall apart, that will too.

Maura: Noooo! I mean, yeah, you’re right. And of course,
if he and Molly Shannon’s character stay employed at Abaddonn—if
Abaddonn exists, post-exposé (cough)—that’ll allow White
to sketch out even more awkwardly negotiated relationships, and to
deal with the emotional fallout of the “ghost” that Tyler was going
back to his spectral state.

Jane: It seems too cruelly ironic that, if the show is
cancelled, “ghost” Tyler will be forced to become a literal phantom
of my counterfactual imagination. I want to see the emotional
fall-outs! I want more Molly Shannon’s jazz hands when she
accentuates “all the positive.”

There are so many What Ifs in the air right now, that I keep
returning to Amy’s voiceovers, unmoored from any specific time or
place—it’s in these reflection that we get closest to any ideal of
“enlightenment.” They read like poetry, which seems fitting, but
they never last long, Amy never inhabits them very long, and I
guess part of it is wondering how much these moments structure
Amy’s worldview, how much she can structure a life around them.
(And look, I’m using “structure” to talk about something that wants
to do away with that concept!) But is it enough, especially for the
kind of life she still imagines for herself? Especially, as you
suggested, when it comes to having a family, that embodiment of The
Future?

Michelle: Well, if I may: I really think the title of the
show has a silent question mark. Which is not a criticism; I
wouldn’t want the question mark to be explicit, somehow, it would
ruin it, the way you’re supposed to just get that the concept
itself is unstable. The moment you’re sure you’re “Enlightened,”
you aren’t anymore.

But that’s probably too subtle a point for people just wanting
more gore and shitty sex jokes.